maintaining a SOAP session in Rails

Question

I'm writing a Rails application which need to maintain a session to a SOAP-based web service, but I'm running in to difficulties between SOAP/REST. After logging in I get a session token, which must be provided in subsequent requests.

I can initiate a connection (including logout) every time, but it seems like a huge amount of overhead. Is there any way to maintain a session via Rails? I would probably need to send keep-alives if the session had to be kept the whole time the Rails application was started.